Today, David and Gareth opened the FIRST SMART Collaborative Classroom in the UK. It was a pleasure to be a part of the day. The year 4 UK students gave their characteristics of “what is alive”, the last of 3 skype lessons between RHS in Canada and Pheasey Park in the UK.

I was honoured to answer a few questions about the technology. I was quick to talk about the PEDAGOGY that is now available because of the tech. Skype provides a world wide audience. The audience changes student attitude.”When I do it for my teacher, it just needs to be good enough, when I do it for the outside world it needs to be GOOD!”(Student quote from PRESES’13)

The SMARTBOARD provides a presence in the room during a SKYPE and provides a place for students to work together on this difficult question.

I have been using my SMART Collaborative Classroom for a few years to help kids learn physics and chemistry while simultaneously teaching 21st Century Learning skills of Communication, Collaboration and Critical Thinking. This blog post is about a couple of math teachers who decided to try out the room. This is their first experience.

I had previously, but vaguely discussed how we use the SMARTBoards as student centered stations, where students work together to solve previously unseen questions. The day before March break, I was out of the room for the day and they decided it was a low enough risk to take a chance. Here is what they wrote to me afterwards.

“Complex word problems were posted on the SMARTboards. Students were grouped (3-5; more when both our classes were combined). There was NO learning curve for the students to use the SMARTboard. All groups, in all three classes I did this with, were fully engaged in problem-solving. Students had choice of problems (from easy to difficult). They were able to use various tools that the SMARTboard offers (ruler, graph paper background, compass, etc.) to try and solve their problems. When our combined classes were working together, students were sharing French-English math vocabulary, which is really important for my FI students to know they can do math in English. My biggest success story though is one of my SEP students who never talks. All I ever get out of him is a mumbled hello, yes or no. I have never seen him talk to any of the students in the class. But yesterday, his group was stuck trying to solve a problem so he took the lead, went up the board and started explaining his idea to the other students who were all listening very attentively. Following his sketches and explanations, the group successfully solved the problem. That was a significant breakthrough for him. When I have done the same activity in my class, with students sitting at desks with separate papers in front of them, he does not contribute to the discussions at all.

I hope we can do this again soon. The students loved it, and I loved listening to the intense math conversations I heard all around the room. Thank you again for letting me use your room, and all of its resources. I know you’ve worked hard to get them. “